Socio
and Psychogenetic Attempts to Explain the Male Inclination towards
Violence Against Women

Ursula
Müller (University of Bielefeld, Germany)
and Angela Minssen

In this paper, I give a
partial insight into an extended secondary analysis I did together with
Angela Minssen.[1] The co-operation between me as a sociologist and
Angela Minssen as a psychoanalyst led us through a huge amount of
diverse literature, but, strikingly enough, we came to confront patterns
of explaining the male inclination for violence against women that
resembled each other more than was to be expected.

1. Changes and
continuities

Looking at male violence
towards known women (Hearn 1998) today, we see a double feature: while
we can see impressive changes on the political side (and this conference
is an impressive example of this), we are also still confronted by
oppressive continuities in the basic traits of scholarly explanations on
the other. Major successes in overcoming the taboos about discussing the
male inclination for violence against women in the general public and on
different political levels run up against a very stable pattern of
argumentation in the basic assumptions about its causes that we find
rather shocking. Theory and practice on the "male inclination for
using violence against women" seem to be drifting apart, and each
is going through its own autonomous development. At present, they only
relate in a few points, and some of them may be fatal, as I want to
point out at the end of my paper.

While examining the
literature, we were initially surprised and later very irritated to see
how thoroughly the blame for this male violence is cast upon mothers or
women. This is an aspect where the new "men's movement
literature" and traditional psychoanalytical concepts are in
surprising harmony.

Psycho- and sociogenetic
explanations offer what we consider to be the problematic possibility of
allowing men to appear as victims rather than offenders. On the societal
level, this perspective makes them prisoners of their "male
role"; on the level of individual psychology, they appear as
victims of a devalued but simultaneously omnipotent mother.

According to this victim
postulate on the sociological level, the "male role" is
changing as a result of progressive modernisation. Its traditional
contents have become obsolete without binding and reliable new proposals
becoming available to replace them. Part of the literature engages in
explicit or implicit attributions of blame: The emancipation of women
has generated uncertainty. Because women have left the place assigned to
them by tradition, men can no longer find their own place. In light of
such a "difficulty", male violence is apparently a regrettable
but basically comprehensible consequence.

On the psychological level,
the victim status of the man has already developed a
"tradition". The boy who is bound and held in symbiosis by his
mother has only one way of escaping this maternal pressure: He
dissociates himself from everything feminine, and the most permanent and
secure way of doing this is through devaluation. From this perspective,
misogyny as a precondition of the male inclination for violence against
women emerges as an inevitable outcome of the exclusive female mothering
that society simultaneously demands and supports as a desirable good.

2. The bourgeois model of
gender characters and its impact on today’s gender relations

One basic sociological idea
behind this paper is the privatisation of social problems at the expense
of women. For a long time, feminist theory has used the concept of the
"gender-specific" or "gender-hierarchical" division
of labour to describe this idea. As Karin Hausen and others have shown,
how the separation between housework and gainful employment that
asserted itself during the 19th century corresponded, on a sociocultural
level, with a social, cultural and emotional polarisation of the
"gender characters" that undertook a division of
"properties, abilities, and emotional as well as psychosexual
characteristics according to gender" (Hausen 1978) on the basis of
a complementary model. This bourgeois concept views women and men as two
opposite poles having almost nothing in common. They differ not only in
the work they are able to do, but also in the intellectual, emotional
and other characteristics of their "being". Nobody is allowed
to be both male and female at the same time. The basic model of
bourgeois relations between the genders is a meeting of two incomplete
persons who can only attain completion through the help of an
appropriate opposite. The mutual dependency that is basically inherent
in this model is de facto turning into male supremacy. [2]

When psychogenesis is taken
as a level of analysis, this model only permits identification within
one's own gender group. Daughters cannot identify with their fathers;
nor sons with their mothers. Analogue to the situation on the
sociogenetic level in which nobody may possess masculine and feminine
characteristics at the same time, the psychogenetic level, perceives
ambivalence as disruptive and disconcerting and as something to be
avoided at all costs. This leads to a strong control interest when
dealing with the environment and the demands and uncertainties that
arise from it.

For masculinity, this
traditional model links the loss of masculinity closely with a
psychological regression towards symbiosis. It is as if to say that a
loss of gender is feared. Analogue to this on the sociogenetic level, it
is feared that a non-controlling approach towards women will lead to a
loss of status. In the traditional gender model, it is far more the case
that the man has to dissociate himself from the woman, who is defined as
being opposite, and constantly control this "definedness".

Because real women do not
comply with these definitions, they pose a permanent threat that leads
to the development of fears in the man that then have to be suppressed
permanently. Hence, the attitude towards woman is characterised by an
underlying fear that places the man in an actually inferior position in
his own eyes. This psychological position broadly, if not completely,
denies the aspect of the societal power of men.

3. Gender ambivalence and men’s
loss of control

In modern society,
experiences of ambivalence are on the increase for men (see, for
instance, Connell's concept of "gender vertigo" 1995; and the
first empirical signs among German men Metz-Goeckel/Mueller 1986).
However, they find themselves in the role of latecomers compared with
women who had already articulated their perception of discrepancies
between norms and needs in the early women's movements at the end of the
19th century and have continued this quite insistently in the new
women's movement since the 1960s.

Men's experiences of
ambivalence take a different form to those of women. Mostly, it seems,
they do not perceive it as an extension and further development of their
agency, but process it as a threat. This feeling of being threatened
contributes to the desire to revive the "old" conditions when
men were still men and women knew their place.

Basically, today's men have
two possible ways of reacting to women's successful processing of
perceived ambivalence that expresses itself as an acquisition of new
rights or their consolidation, a shaking of the basic premises of
patriarchal structures, an expansion of the sociosymbolic representation
of the feminine, a politicisation of the asymmetry between the genders
in society and so forth. First, they can acknowledge it voluntarily or
reluctantly as a potential, and exploratively or enthusiastically engage
in attempts to exploit such a potential for themselves. Second, they can
give way to their feeling of being threatened and reject the new
potential through destructive devaluation. The majority of men are
probably located on a continuum between these two poles; it may well be
that a process perspective is also appropriate for most of them. We
shall try to explain this with an example.[3]

The generation of men aged
35-55 years who have now achieved success in their careers may initially
have welcomed the emancipation of women strongly because it relieved the
pressure on their uncertain masculinity. However, with increasing
occupational and social success, they do not develop an extended
self-consciousness based on gender awareness and symmetry; instead, a
consolidation of traditional masculinity occurs accompanied by a desire
to fend off the continual demands for masculinity to change—both their
own and that of others. Men who have attained power seem to lose the
ability to accept ambivalence, and many of them are no longer willing to
co-operate with women who want to establish gender symmetry.

The male belief, found in
various forms, that women are less suitable than men for public office
(an inheritance from bourgeois political philosophy) conceals the fear
that women might perform just as well if not better than men. This makes
it necessary to devalue feminine potency by attributing it with
irrationality. This addresses the other side of the belief that women
are less suitable for public office than men: It invokes the man's fear
of losing control to the woman (see above).

However, when women have
attained higher posts, the illusion is maintained that they can only
manage so well through the invisible support of powerful men who make
their own potency available to them. This enables the controlling man to
remain in contact with the object of control and retain the fiction of
control. If this fiction can no longer be maintained, an attempt is made
to "destroy" the object through massive attack. Another way of
overcoming the threat of the publicly potent woman would be to give up
control and recognise the woman. However, for many men this still seems
to be unthinkable. This is a way of retaining something that Virginia
Woolf recognised long ago: Women cannot mirror themselves in men. Only a
few, it would seem, have managed to attain this privileged position so
far.

For the present analysis, we
were very surprised to realise that most of the diverse literature we
went through revealed the pattern that we have just tried to sketch
above in general terms. Only a few transcendental trends can be found in
psychoanalysis, in the "new men's movement literature", in the
criticism and further development of feminist analysis, in sociological
and educational literature on masculinity and so forth.[4] The idea that
there may be men who are secure in their masculinity, who do not
consider their masculinity to be threatened by feminine power, is still
not very widespread [5], as we shall see in the following sections.

3.1 Feminist
psychoanalysis on "becoming male"

A series of more recent
studies that tend to be oriented towards psychoanalytical concepts
address the relation between particular forms of mothering and the
emergence of masculine misogyny from various perspectives (see, in
particular, Johnson, 1988; Rohde-Dachser, 1991; Schuch-Minssen, 1992).
These talk about, among others, the "overpowering",
"devouring", or "omnipotent" mother from whom the
small boy urgently has to liberate himself. He perceives femininity as
an overpowering experience to which he is exposed helplessly because of
his developmental dependency (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1974, 1988; Chodorow,
1985; Olivier, 1988). On the one side, the mother is perceived
positively, because she guarantees satisfaction of needs; on the other
side, her all-encompassing power leads to a narcissistic wound, namely,
being powerless oneself, and this is interpreted as the basis for
hostility towards mothers (see, above all, Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1988).
This mother who is perceived as all-powerful not only inflicts
narcissistic wounds, but her usurpatory, overwhelming, and devouring
quality is also perceived as an impairment and constraint that the boy
wishes to escape from. However, these desires for liberation are not
just restricted to childhood. According to the concepts cited above, the
man continues to be involved in this striving towards independence
throughout his life. This simultaneously consolidates his dependence on
his early mother. However, this dependence is not based on solidarity,
but on having to ensure that one never enters the dependency of a
symbiotic relationship. It seems that the man's life with a woman is a
continuous defence against being pressurised and being caught up in a
relationship that simply takes a different form. Hence, adulthood proves
to be a repeat of the efforts to gain independence from the mother and
to maintain this independence through, above all, devaluation.

The deficit in this approach
is that it is limited to mother-child dyads as a sort of space that is
removed from society. The claims regarding an all-powerful mother in her
relationship with the child are generally contextualised through a lack
of power in society or at least a disadvantaged position for both
mothers and women (Schütze, 1986; Krüger et al., 1987; Müller, 1989).
This societal tension is expressed even in the intimate relationship
between mother and child. Then, depending on how strongly the mother is
dependent on coercing the child because of the lack of alternative ways
of shaping her life, separation from the mother can take the form of a
hostile disassociation from her or curiosity towards the environment
(Benjamin, 1990).

The available literature,
however, only seems to attach significance to the boy's rather hostile
desires to dissociate himself from his mother. Recent psychoanalytical
approaches propose that the gender difference between boys and their
mothers leads to a particular form of separation and dissociation.

One way of looking at this
focuses on the "narcissistic wound" (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1988)
as the outcome of primary helplessness and defencelessness. One can free
oneself from the overpowering strength of the maternal imago or learn to
control it by devaluing the all-powerful mother through something that
she does not possess: a penis. For the boy, this supposedly means that
despite submission to the all-powerful mother, he now realises that he
possesses an organ that his mother does not have. The satisfaction
gained through this is unstable and needs to be repeated continuously.
The outcome, and this makes the aspect of devaluating femininity a
founder of male identity, is a triumphant devaluation of the other
gender. Viewing the feminine as castrated, powerless, and inferior then
represents the long-desired triumph and the long-desired power over the
seemingly omnipotent mother.

The other variant of
separation - which has also been adopted without question by feminist
authors (see, above all, Chodorow, 1985) - is that boys fundamentally
have to distance themselves from identification with their mothers.
Apparently, none of their primary identification with her may be
retained without threatening their masculine identity. The development
of masculine gender identity seems - and Greenson (1968) views this as a
necessity - to continue to require "de-identification" from
the mother. The acquisition and maintenance of masculine gender identity
has to be achieved through the strong, defensive differentiation from
the primary (identification) object of the mother (see, in particular,
Stoller, 1968; Tyson, 1991).

Regardless of whether
masculinity is a vehicle for independence, that is, it emerges through
necessity, or whether independence is the driving force behind the
development of masculinity, the quality of masculinity still remains
undefined. With the consolidation of the gender difference, it already
seems that "masculinity" means only one thing: "not being
female". However, if masculine is defined only negatively as not
feminine, all parts of the self that are experienced as having negative
connotations such as weakness, fear, dependence, the need for fusion,
powerlessness, passivity, and so forth are projected on to the woman in
whom they are supposedly controlled and kept at a distance. Woman
becomes the "container" for these inherently intolerable
conscious or unconscious stirrings (see, in particular, Rohde-Dachser,
1991).

The process of distancing
from the feminine has, at first hand, no connection to "real"
women; in this view, masculinity is not promoted through a process of
interaction with a concrete "other", but with an imaginary,
interior "reality". Traditional masculinity distances itself
from an interior image of femininity that has been handcrafted, so to
speak, by the man himself. Distancing oneself from an imaginary
femininity leads to the stabilisation of a male identity that is
precarious through its dependence on this specific form of
disassociation from and definition of imagined femininity. In other
words, it is crucial for one's own identity to defend the view of
femininity as weak, fearful, and the like. Everything that is feminine
but does not correspond to the imago described, just like everything
masculine that presents an aspect of this imago becomes a threat and has
to be devalued or opposed and from this, indeed, may derive some
inclination to violence.

3.2 The "new men’s
literature" on masculinity

The "new men's
literature" addressing the topic of the "masculine inclination
for violence" - including authors such as Bly, Bornemann, Keen,
Schissler, Hollstein, Gottschalch or Schnack/Neutzling - discusses the
masculine inclination to use violence against women almost exclusively
as a reaction of the boy or the man to something that women -
particularly mothers - possess or do. Impressively deterministic
formulations suggest that the inclination for violence against women
should be understood as something that will remain inevitable until a
change should occur - where this change should come from remains
unclear. From this discussion, we give some examples.

The hypothesis that men are
envious of the woman's ability to give birth to children was originally
proposed by Karin Horney in "Die Angst vor der Frau" published
in 1932 to counteract Freud's concept of penis envy. She assumed that it
is the boy's envy of childbearing, in other words, his envy of something
that girls possess rather than the fear of a loss that they have
suffered, that is responsible for certain fears and wounds that the boy
suffers during the phallic phase. She had already assumed that the
overemphasis on the penis—among children; in the theory formulation of
male analysts, and, we would add, in the men's movement literature —basically
represents only a desperate attempt to deny the frightening female
genitals.

Mostly unaffected by the
complex arguments of Horney, but also from the differentiation of a
Bruno Bettelheim whom he endorses verbally, Gottschalch associates
hatred of women with the self-hate of men. He assumes that men are
envious of women because they are more powerful. In men's minds, women
can give and take; the small child is completely and utterly at the
mercy of the mother, and fears of being abandoned remain the deepest
fears for adults as well. Gottschalch believes that men have defeated
women "only" on the social level but not on the psychological
one. On the psychological level, they continue to be dependent on women,
and as long as this is not recognised and, moreover, it is not
acknowledged that this dependency is mutual, it can develop into men
hating women and vice versa. A further reason for male envy of women is
their inexhaustible sexual potency, which Gottschalch formulates very
simply in terms of biological determinism: Through her physical
constitution, a women is always able to engage in the sexual act; but
this is not the case for men. At the same time, a man can never be sure
about what a women is experiencing during the sexual act, which can
increase his own sexual anxieties and suggests a devaluation and
suppression of the sexuality of the other as an antidote.

Hermann(1989) also argues in
the same direction, commencing with the fear that men have of women,
that this generates a inclination for violence, and that the cause of
this fear is once more envy of the ability to give birth.

These statements completely
neglect the possibility that the boy's envy of childbearing could also
become integrated into his personality in a way that does not lead to a
devaluation of woman but to an interest in her and to curiosity, to an
exchange on a level of equal rights. Their arguments concentrate on the
phallic defence organisation whose consequence is then the devaluation
of the woman.

There is a similar situation
with attempts to explain the inclination for violence as an effort to
recreate the illusion of one's own grandiosity and omnipotence.
Bornemann (1987) and Gottschalch (1984, 1991), but many other authors as
well, discuss how men are experiencing a loss of confidence through the
weakening of gender roles and the loss of traditional masculine identity
- all evoked by the emancipation of women. In this context, Hollstein
(1992,1993) talks about the "social castration" of the male
because contraceptives have given women power over birth control, as
well as the impact of female employment that has countered male hegemony
in the occupational domain. As with the supporters of childbearing envy,
it is once more the man who is the victim. Holstein, for example,
accuses American women of wanting not only the sensitive and
understanding man but also the conqueror, the seducer, and the
successful careerist.

Goldberg (1986) also sees
only the threats to the man arising from both the maternal and the
self-aware woman. Whereas the former keeps the man dependent, the latter
suddenly leaves him to cope by himself without preparation. The man
always loses out, because he can never foresee in which way women will
develop. Unpredicted changes have paralysed him, they have made it
impossible for him to make demands, and, instead, he responds with
helpless anger or silent resignation.

In summary, these authors
believe that the narcissistic wounding that the man is
"forced" to process through violence and a inclination for
violence against women is composed of three elements: first, the
inability to retain the role of the patriarch, the powerful man; second,
the fact that there are women who are stronger or at least as strong as
the man; and third, that there is a prevailing idea of not being able to
satisfy he woman's sexual demands.

The focus is on separation
and disassociation from the usurping, occupying, pestering and
threatening mother; and the question of blame has already been decided
against the mothers/women. The different types of mother compiled by
Schnack and Neutzling (1990,1993) - both the controlling and the
battling, the defenceless and the "mother as companion", the
"compulsive cleaner" (a further variant of the devalued
mother) as well as the lonely mother who replaces her marriage with her
relationship to the son, but does not really give him this primary
status in her life - all make it impossible for their sons to attain
happiness as autonomous persons.

Publications of this sort
have been very powerful in influencing the public discourses on
masculinity and male inclination to violence, whereas the serious
scholarly literature that affords more tolerance towards uncertainty,
varieties, and differentiation among men, and does not participate into
the misogyny underpinning of the "new men's literature" (for
instance the works of Morgan, Hearn, Connell, Seidler) in my opinion
still has to make it's way to challenge the successful discourse on men
as women's victims.

From a sociological
perspective, the findings reported above indicate one central mode of
attributing responsibility: Women - and particularly, but not just,
mothers - are assigned responsibility for the internal processes of men.
This process seems to be a not yet well regarded part of the
"hidden curricula"; the message is not just boys or men being
more important, as feminist researchers, for instance Dale Spender and
numerous others have demonstrated, but girls or women being responsible
for the boys' or men's behaviour. This has been shown in some German
research on male and female teachers professional self-concepts.

Karin Flaake has shown
(though within a theoretical concept of difference) that female teachers
often band together with the girls in forging a sort of regressive pact;
in other words, they join them in slipping into the role of being the
victims of male dominance in the classroom. This is accompanied by the
clear message that "The boys are terrible enough as it is, so at
least you may behave". However, the implicit message is also that
it does not lie within the power of women to change men; they can only
try to contain them somehow or other. The best way to do this is to
offer curricula that are mainly interesting for boys, and to appeal to
the girls to show understanding for this. Their interests at school need
to take second place to motivating boys to participate in the class. The
finding that boys, on average, are given more opportunity to express
themselves actively (findings resumed in Kreienbaum 1992; pioneering:
Dale Spender) is also part of this process. The girls' motivation, in
contrast, is left to them. They have to learn to take responsibility for
their own internal processes[6] [7] they have nobody to whom to delegate
this.

Delegating responsibility for
men's internal processes, for their emotional development, their
emotional satisfaction, and their appeasement, to women does work
because women shoulder also this responsibility within the framework of
the traditional model of gender relationships described above. But it
does not work without the development of an equivalent self-concept in
women: a feeling of inner superiority, a distanced, as if to say,
"moral" omnipotence (cf. the works of Margrit Brueckner 1983:
1993; 1998). Frequently, such traditional arrangements are still
emphasised and consolidated in processes found in schools, even though
this is not a conscious strategy on the part of the actors.

This shows how the
traditional division of labour is also an asymmetric division of
emotional structures and moral responsibility. We postulate that
allocating responsibilities according to gender in line with the
traditional model is inherently extremely violent. It creates
large-scale asymmetries.

These asymmetries also impact
on private male violence against women. Hagemann-White talks about the
"societal lack of compulsive empathy" in men. This promises
them - perhaps no longer necessarily so culturally valued as before,
though still accepted sympathetically - a far-reaching freedom from
sanctions when they claim they have no longer been able to control
themselves or to understand what their partner was saying. An impressive
example has most recently provided in Hearn (1998) and in the eighties
by Godenzi (1987).

It is the culturally dominant
pattern for emotional commitments and happiness - normative
heterosexuality and traditional marriage - that keeps an asymmetric type
of gender relationship alive, together with the male inclination to
violence against women. The reactions of men to an imaginary femininity
continue to be widely accepted as valid. In their private sphere, these
men are surrounded by women who compensate their powerlessness in
society through an imagined omnipotence in private life - both in their
own imagination and in the imagination of their male
"partners".

6. Structural asymmetries
and state politics

Viewing the preservation of
the family, the maintenance of the partnership, and the continued
presence of the father as an indubitable good for the welfare of the
child is a refinement of the ideology of motherhood that restricts the
action scopes of women, even though these have expanded in principle.
This is reinforced by the fact that it is not just the individual woman
but also the institutions of the state that frequently view the
preservation of the family as the target of their measures, and consider
the presence of the father to be essential for both economic and
normative reasons. The "gender contract" that is implicitly or
explicitly underpinning politics against violence as well as therapeutic
measures has to be revealed, but some areas of research, for instance in
family sociology, prefer until today to investigate new forms of living
together as deviant[8]

In numerous policies on
violence, the ideology of motherhood calls for family solidarity and the
presence of the father as an indispensable basis for the child's
welfare. This places constraints on female action scope that has
otherwise expanded objectively in recent decades. Government
institutions support these constraints by focusing their activities, as
(not only) conservative - liberal governments do, on preserving the
bourgeois nuclear family. It would seem to be very apparent that the
continuation of the traditional model of the family - not in reality,
but on the level of ideas, of imagination - provides the conditions that
enable the continuation of traditional masculinity.

An important precondition for
stemming private male violence against women is the woman's social and
economic independence (a feminist claim with a long tradition; see the
summary argument in Godenzi 1993). Indeed, an US-American pilot
programme shows that providing battered women with independent housing,
education, and income, drastically reduces the risk of becoming a victim
of violence again.

However, studies by Benard
and Schlaffer have shown that even when they are economically
independent, women may stop themselves from engaging in adequate
confrontations with their partners. The power of normativity is
frequently still decisive, even when the economic and legal
preconditions for independence have been met. This shows how partnership
ideology frequently functions as a relationship trap: Studies on
partnership conflicts have shown how, during the course of their
relationships, women abandon the integration of love and equality that
they had originally held so dear, and no longer compare their
non-egalitarian partner with themselves but with other men (see
Hochschild, 1989; Müller, 1997), and definite losses of chances,
property and perspectives, may be evaluated as internal growth (see
Hagemann-White and research group on migrating couples).

We can conclude that a
gender-egalitarian division of labour and power would also impact on the
constraints of the prevailing structures of emotional commitment, at
least in the long term. The area of emotional commitment, however, is
also a battlefield of its own.

7. Concluding remarks:
Some visionary aspects of gender symmetry

We have argued, providing
some examples, that large parts of the literature that provides direct
or indirect arguments to discuss the male inclination to use violence
against women, reveal an inherent determinism. Explanations are very
often aiming at closed types of argument, that leaves male violence as a
more or less inevitable consequence.[9] In many psychoanalytical
concepts - as well as, by the way, in anthropological studies - the
development of masculinity is imagined as a difficult and risky process
with insecure results, that starts with the dissociation from the
feminine, by means of devaluation. The basic and non-contested
assumption is often that male children have to dis-identify thoroughly
from the feminine, and can only build up a masculine identity by
orientating towards males. In our view, this is an unnecessary
short-cutting on the theoretical level. Benjamin and others have
supposed that children do not identify with males or females, but with
qualities of relations, and Irene Fast has stated that the concept of
decisive "losses" (of feminine traits, for instance being able
to give birth) is only talking about the loss of abilities and
capacities that have never been owned in reality, but in fantasy.
Therefore, a theoretical possibility to open up masculine development on
the level of psychology would be to postulate that elements of the early
fantasies of completeness, of disposing of male and female capacities
and abilities at the same time, may not be devalued by means of an
imaginary feminine. Rather, they could be maintained, narcissistically
appreciated, and disposed of in fantasy, in order to enjoy them in
reality on the side of a partner, instead of fighting them.

On the sociological level,
masculinity and femininity have revealed as societal constructions in
some areas of feminist, pro-feminist and anti-sexist discourse; indeed,
the variations of masculinity and femininity that are culturally
accepted have multiplied. We tried to point out, however, the
intertwining of some levels of gender relations in order to achieve some
criteria for continuities and change. Gendered division of work has not
become obsolete for explaining male violence, but is still remaining
central, as it provides economic and emotional dependencies and
asymmetrical gender relations.

To understand the difference
between women and men as an interesting and therefore erotically
attractive differentness in which each other person is viewed as
complete rather than in terms of a reciprocal attribution of deficits,
is to propose an alternative model that is certainly still utopian.
However, as our arguments progressed, this model has always provided a
"critical horizon" that can serve as a background when
examining the literature on the male inclination for violence. This is a
model of a reciprocal conception of gender in which "gender"
is not used to define one's social "place", difference is not
construed through devaluation, and the male inclination for violence is
not viewed as the "normal case" in society, but as a
developmental failure, a failure that, nonetheless, is still proposed
and protected by society.

[2] Of course, this is a
shortcut of a complex ideology; the pattern of
"complementarity" (and not reciprocity) between women and men
has existed before the rise of the bourgeoisie, but in the 19th century
it changed its quality and became densified into gender characters,
legitimising division of labour, exclusion of women from education,
power and politics, and so on. In political philosophy and in the
philosophy of science, gender characterology was used to prove women’s
incapability to succeed in these areas, and to legitimise that men were
the only gender present, representing the "whole" in those
fields. See, for instance, Benhabib on Hegel, Women, and Irony. [3]
There are some members of the still rather new red-green German
government we may have in mind here, but it is not a specifically German
phenomenon.

[4] The few authors who go
beyond this basic pattern include Jessica Benjamin, Carel
Hagemann-White, Margrit Brückner, Eva Paluda-Korte, Edda Uhlmann, Ruth
Großmaß, Bob Connell, the members of this meeting (of course), and
ourselves. Aspects that pass beyond gender polarization can be found in
Irene Faust and in Christa Rohde-Dachser, although the latter also
retains conventional definitions.

[5] Therefore a secondary
topic is the question regarding the circumstances under which
"giving men" can develop who do not "fall over"
immediately when they have conceded power and do not feel threatened by
women who confront them with equal power or publicly strive towards
this.We cannot elaborate on this here, but will retain it as a horizon
of critique, and return to it in our concluding remarks.

[6] The lack of feeling for
one’s own responsibility is also very common among violent men, as
Hearn (1998) has shown impressively: talking to 60 men having been
arrested for violence towards known women showed that almost all of them
presented themselves as „really not violent„; their violence has
been an „exception„ , they had to be „really provoked„.

[8] As an example, there has
been some German research still in 1996 to investigate into the impact
of mothers' gainful employment on schoolchildren's inclination to
violent behaviour in the schoolyard, or in 1999 some research assuming
that East German mothers' high labour market participation is more or
less directly the reason for adolescent right wing radicalism, including
racist yiolent behaviour.

[9] We have left out here
some research that is referring to social deprivation in the same
"automatic" way of thinking.